In early December, Yahoo announced its first mobile developer conference. The event was to be run in conjunction with Flurry, the mobile analytics firm Yahoo bought last year, and was part of the company’s renewed commitment to mobile.
With all the MWC hubbub, we had all but forgotten about Yahoo’s conference, but the one-day conference took place in San Francisco today. Yahoo had promised us a suite of tools for mobile app developers and the company launched those tools in the form of Yahoo’s new mobile developer suite.
This suite of five products includes Flurry Analytics with Explorer, Flurry Pulse, Yahoo App Publishing, Yahoo Search in Apps, and Yahoo App Marketing. The goal is to help app developers analyze, monetize, and market their apps using technology from Flurry and video ad platform BrightRoll (another Yahoo-owned property).
Flurry Analytics Explorer is actually an update to the regular Flurry Analytics tool, which is being rolled into the suite of developer apps. Yahoo promises support for more complex queries and easier data exploration in this new version (hence the name). Flurry Pulse is for sharing app signals with partners via the existing Flurry SDK. Yahoo App Publishing is a video and display ad publishing tool that uses Yahoo Gemini, Flurry, and BrightRoll.
Similarly, Yahoo App Marketing allows users to buy targeted native and video ads across Yahoo’s network of content (including Tumblr). Finally, Yahoo Search in Apps offers easy integration of Yahoo’s proprietary search engine for developers that want to incorporate search into their app.
More than a thousand developers were present at today’s conference. According to USA Today, Yahoo’s mobile revenue has topped $1.2 billion and the company now employs more than 500 mobile developers, about 10 times the number it had before it shifted its focus to mobile a few years ago. Mashable reports that more than 200,000 people already use Flurry. These new tools flesh our Flurry’s functionality and serve as a massive opportunity for growth for Yahoo.
[source]Yahoo, Yahoo Developer Suite[/source]
